You’re Old Ugly & In The Way; (For Whom The Bell)

De facto discrimination is a matter of unexamined economic priorities. Extremes are more apparent in places like Rio, San Juan, Juarez and Tijuana than in most of North America except regarding people who, by dint of age, categorically, have access to fewer opportunities for education, health care, employment mobility, housing, entertainment; everything related to quality of life. Yeah, so what? That’s just the way of the world. Yeah? Then why is it worse for older citizens living in North America than in the most economically challenged communities of the so-called, undeveloped world.

Yeah, ‘Che’ Guevara never noticed this. Abe Lincoln neither and Obamalamadama is no more hip to the profound affect this has for everyone in North America than is the fringiest naked feminist fringer escaping the box of vaginal perturbations. Age? Ignore it.

Age discrimination includes the greatest number of people that suffer the worst effects of more kinds of discriminatory practices and equally affects people of every ethnicity and a wide range of economic status, killing the rich as well as the poor, with nearly complete exclusion from employment and advancement, fewest housing opportunities and with the greater need, they receive the least competent and most neglectful medical attention.

As the economy tightens up, the line of exclusion falls, today affecting people over 55 and while the media whines and wails when minor bias is inflicted on ethnic and gender demographics, discrimination against older people is taken-for-granted, a “so what” fact of life in America in the same way as slavery was viewed in the 18th century, child labor in the 19th century and sweat shops in Pakistan today. And it is all economic priorities.

This kind of bias will directly affect you and every person in North America, including those who die younger. When you die, you will probably die as a consequence of an age-related decision. Every single member of every category of discrimination who survives their 50th birthday will face forms of age-related discrimination.

Like “happy” slaves on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, as people age in America, they find dignity by pretending their fate was pre-ordained, as if sanctioned by a higher power. But it isn’t. That’s why you don’t see it in Scandinavia and Germany, nor do you see it in Portugal and other places where familial traditions shape cultural/political values.

The problem results from a combination of conditioning children by a secular state based on capitalism through media developed and owned by commercial enterprise that targets people with the least experience and education, thus promoting youth over maturity.

In promoting and selling youth, commercial media incidentally validates age bias by instilling negative views of maturity. It’s not intentional it’s simply thoughtless, similar to the mentality that dammed rivers for hydroelectric power regardless of the obviously predictable outcome. When it’s perceived as best to appear young and beautiful, it must be disheartening to appear to be older and wiser. “You make me fell so young…”

In promoting youth, you promote a correlative pejorative about age. This argument has been won about the negative effect of casting Anglo-Saxons as heroic protagonists, giving the impression that heroes are by definition, possessed of light skin tones.

While media is unwittingly complicit in this conditioning, the medical profession practices the bias to the detriment of patients in the face of science. Doctors are not typically well-educated in the humanities, history nor social sciences. Even the holistic, American doctor treats aging according to superstitions that contradict scientific knowledge. While we have observed that genetic information in our bodies’ cells mutates as a mathematic consequence of repeated iterations, which produces physical effects but exactly how this occurs and the areas affected varies widely in individuals. There are conditions that can mitigate, negate or enhance certain types mutation. The medical profession has begun to reshape its thinking about aging as profitable new drug therapies defeat increasing numbers of specific mutational effects but the mentality of practicing medical doctors is for the most part stuck in the 19th century and this ignorance plus an interesting legal decision limiting malpractice awards means murder by medicine.

If aging is genetically induced, i.e., established in our dna, then agism in medical practice is genocidal. The bias, however, occurs not in hospitals but in the justice system, in which precedence is cited to limit juries to base awards for medical malpractice in which a patient has died, not on the enormity of the loss of life to the victim and family but on the percentage of a span of life based on actuarial tables. The parents of a two-year old who dies on account of medical neglect or malpractice may be entitled to compensation that interests attorneys in pursuing a case against an insurance company, while the children and grand children of a person of 82 won’t find an attorney for this same reason. As a result, doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical product manufacturers get away with murder. Ironically, even though lawyers, doctors and lawmakers must be aware, perhaps subconsciously of their own vulnerability, when they age, they have accepted the personal risk in return for financial support from insurers. Naturally.

Age discrimination produces a double bind since the result of not ensuring a healthy life for older people comes with a high cost for society because all human beings become depressed whenever they feel they have no future and treating the symptoms of depression is expensive and rapidly becoming the greatest cost of medical care.

2 thoughts on “You’re Old Ugly & In The Way; (For Whom The Bell)”

Be good to explore the jargon use of “elders”. Some beneficial quality is associated with the idea of aging or precedence, which is a good admission and implies a value but that value is not respected at all in the commercial world in which “young and beautiful” must be constantly promoted, with the unavoidable consequence that age and not so beautiful is in an important sense, devalued if not demeaned?